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Oct 7, 2016

Helpful (4)

Data Scientist Interview

Anonymous Interview Candidate in San Francisco, CA

No Offer

Neutral Experience

Difficult Interview

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in September 2016.

Interview

I was referred by a friend who currently works at Airbnb. The recruiter reached out to me two weeks later and asked if I would be interested in a different position. I said yes, and had a brief introductory conversation with the hr. The HR then asked for my availability for a take home challenge that needs 24 hours to complete. When I finally got the take home challenge, the instruction actually said the completion time should be within 3-6 hours. Not sure why there was a such a big time discrepancy. I completed the take home and was asked to come on site for a half day interview. I was sent the onsite interview with a different job title.. I emailed the recruiter back and clarified the position I was interviewing for. I was also told another position opened up and I would be considered for two positions.

During onsite I had breakfast with one of the team members, and then was given another data challenge to complete in 3 hours, followed by a presentation. There were about 5,6 people at the presentation. The afternoon after my onsite I was told I did not pass to the final round.

For the amount of time I spent on the interview process with airbnb, and despite being onsite (they have a beautiful campus and great food), I received little information about what they do in the analytics team. I (still) had no idea who the hiring manager was (maybe there isn't one?).. 95% of the communications were with the recruiter. People at the presentation walked in and sat down at the conference room but didn't introduce themselves (a little awkward...) in the beginning I asked everyone that came into the presentation their name, role, etc, but people that came in later I had no idea what their role was in Airbnb... During and after the presentation I answered a lot of questions, but had no time left to ask the team any questions. I understand things are moving at a fast pace at airbnb, it just felt like a whirlwind.. But the data challenges were pretty fun, and hr responded quickly to all the questions. 0

Interview Questions

All questions are directly related to the presentation.What does the gap represent in your graph? Answer Question

Other Interview Reviews for Airbnb

Nov 23, 2016

Helpful (1)

Data Scientist Interview

Anonymous Employee

Accepted Offer

Positive Experience

Average Interview

Application

I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Airbnb.

Interview

Each addtional step is contingent on passing the step above:1. HR Screening to gauge level of interest and fit2. Take Home Data Challenge3. Interview with potential intern manager4. Interview with experienced employee to evaluate fit with culture/org

Data Scientist Interview

Anonymous Interview Candidate in San Francisco, CA

No Offer

Negative Experience

Easy Interview

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in April 2018.

Interview

They first ask you to work on a home assignment. It took me about 8 hours to finish it. They reviewed and said I did very well on it and invited onsite. Onsite interviews are extremely easy and don't really test your knowledge of data science or machine learning. Everyone who watched the whole Andrew Ng course is already overqualified for the interview. After the onsite interview, I got a feedback that I don't have a product vision (there were no questions about it at all during the interview) and low modeling skills (so, why did they say I did well on home assignment if they think so?).

My impression is that they use really outdated technologies like tfidf and logistic regression. Don't recommend to go there if you want to work on state of the art ML.

Data Scientist Interview

I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in May 2018.

Interview

Phone screen with the recruiter, another with one of the DS managers, and then a take-home which they give you four days to complete and expect a candidate to spend about eight hours on.

Getting tired of this general tech trend of making a candidate go through these long "homeworks" where the candidate is incredibly engaged, but there being very little effort from the company. Spent many hours on the homework, but was not accepted to come on for the final loop and received zero feedback on the work provided. Takes five to ten minutes to jump on the phone to give some feedback and suggestions. On top of that I had a DS from a larger tech company look at my work, gave a few small nits, but said it was solid work overall which just leads me to more questions on what Airbnb is even looking for.

Respect your candidates and try to put in at least half as much effort as they do when going through the process.

Interview Questions

Homework was an end-to-end product question. Pretty typical supply/demand balancing for a PaaS company with a lot of data columns to do various segmentations on. Needed to provide a presentation for a non-technical audience and then a technical appendix for the data crowd to build on top of your work. Answer Question

Data Scientist Interview

Anonymous Interview Candidate

No Offer

Negative Experience

Easy Interview

Application

I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb in April 2018.

Interview

Applied data scientist, Beijing online and was contacted by HR. Later worked on a 48-hour data assignment. Got a system-generated rejection later 3 weeks later.HR was quite unprofessional. They were too be busy to reply emails. Never provided any feedback even they promised to give feedback in 1 week. The whole application process feels like a mystery... I regretted spending time on the application.

Interview Questions

Data analysis on one case study. Final deliverable expected is a ppt. Answer Question

Data Scientist Interview

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2+ weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in November 2014.

Interview

Initial talk with recruiter to discuss me, the role I was applying for, and the company. Talked about what I was looking for, how I wanted to grow, and my experiences with Airbnb as a product. Recruiter was very kind and clear, and told me exactly what I was to expect in each phase of the process.

Next phase was a take-home data challenge- pretty straightforward: you're given a dataset and in 3 hours, you answer some questions about it, present results graphically, etc and email it back. This was returned to the team I was applying for, and I heard in less than a week that I was invited to onsite. Another phone call with the recruiter followed, who gave me details about onsite.

Onsite interview has been described extensively on Quora- arrive at 930/10, meet with a team member to go over assignment, start working. Lunch around 1230, followed by presentation at 430. It's an open-ended and therefore tough assignment, but super fun. You just have to get to work. You work alongside the rest of Airbnb- if you think it's too loud/ annoying/ etc, it's probably not a good fit for you. At presentation, people were interested in what I had done and asked some challenging questions. But they seemed driven by curiosity than anything else.

After this, was invited for a final set of onsite interviews. Recruiter followed up with some things to read, videos about company and their values. Met with recruiter morning of interview and she again walked me through the whole process, detailing what I could expect and who I would be meeting with. 2 interviews were cultural/ core values interviews and I am sure they have been documented elsewhere. In short, will you be a good fit here? How do you approach challenges? What moves you? Interviews with a software engineer, head of product, and team manager followed. All were hands-on, and entailed demonstrating product knowledge and business.

Offer followed onsite, recruiters were very hands-on and helpful through offer and negotiation. Various members of team I was to join emailed and offered to answer questions, including managers.

Data Scientist Interview

I applied in-person. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in February 2015.

Interview

In summary, there were three steps in the interview process:1) Take home challenge. I was given a problem set to analyze for interesting/actionable leads. The deliverable was in the form of a presentation deck. The recommended time spent was 3-6 hours.2) Then there was a 3 hours on site. I was given another data set and asked to perform more analysis to be added to the deck, and then presented the results to the group.3) Final on site interview. There were 5 in total, two technical and three character interviews.

Although exhausting, I really enjoyed the interview experience because the people were genuinely nice and the HR was responsive.

Data Scientist Interview

I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in March 2015.

Interview

I applied online in January and got contacted in March. The whole process took 3-4 weeks. I think the arrangement of the process is not very well organized, but it is understandable since they are moving so fast with their growth. The recruiter called me once at 7pm and replying email at night is quite common.The take home data challenge take me around 8 hours to finish for both the analysis and the presentation while they said it should be around 3-4 hours to finish. I think this is a sign why I failed the onsite data challenge. The onsite data challenge is only 4 hours...I don't even have time... I think this is also what they are testing you about. Since their pace is so fast, they need you to get things done or at least report some useful insights given a short time.Got rejected since I don't have much experience and didn't do the onsite data challenge very well.

Interview Questions

For the onsite data challenge, a question was asked regarding my practice of removing the missing values. What if it causes bias? What will you do then? 12 Answers

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Data Scientist Interview candidates at Airbnb rate the interview process an overall negative experience. Interview candidates say the interview experience difficulty for Data Scientist at Airbnb is average. Some recently asked Airbnb Data Scientist interview questions were, "Parse function is mentioned in the OA, it has slightly different from the resource on the internet" and "Why work for Airbnb?". 52% of the interview applicants applied online.